The Roadwork

I am not a fan of the term “elevator pitch.” It feels like an overpromise. But in almost twenty years of pitching advertising accounts not only do I know my spiel, but I believe it in the depths of my soul. It goes something like this, “We believe in the power of knowing and understanding your target from both a functional and emotional perspective. Only then can we connect the heart of the target to the heart of the brand.”

I have had the good fortune of working with people who have modeled this ethos and made me a better marketer. I often refer to it as the willingness to do the road work to get it right. There have been some memorable moments. As an Associate Brand Manager at Snapple, we went through trash cans in a college dorm to get closer to how students were supplementing their meal plans. Or using digital ethnographies to inventory consumer’s refrigerators and pantries to gauge their actual sweetener knowledge.

In the year 2000, I was an Account Executive at Deutsch New York. This was during the heyday of the agency’s meteoric rise. I worked in an emerging division on a smaller account. I was less than two years out of college and lacked the New York swagger of my peers. From my polo shirts to my boat shoes (which were NOT cool at the time), I reeked of Connecticut. I worked hard, drank heavily at company functions to quell my anxiety, and eventually honed a self-deprecating Jewish guy humor that allowed me to break out of my shell and get noticed.

This led to my first new business pitch. For a young AE, being included in a new business pitch was a big deal. My moment came when I was asked to help pitch the Domino’s business. The expectation was that I would be a contributing team member while maintaining my regular account duties. This led to many late nights, but the agency had a $7.00 dinner reimbursement policy after 7:00 PM, so I felt like I was winning.

It was on the Domino’s pitch that I was literally and figuratively introduced to the concept of target audience roadwork. You see the franchisee in central Connecticut was considered influential and it was decided that I should spend a day working in his operation. Perhaps the Connecticut credibility helped me here.

I showed up at the shop in Danbury around dawn. The first thing the franchisee did was give me my Domino’s polo to wear while working the counter and making deliveries. I spent the morning at the impinger oven preparing pizzas to be sold by the slice at the local high school. As lunch time approached, I was paired with a delivery driver to deliver pizzas to offices and homes in the area.

There are a few things that still stand out from our time making deliveries.

·      The stress and pressure of making change out of your own pocket on a customer’s doorstep is real. I have always suffered from math phobia and needing to perform on the spot was particularly anxiety inducing.

·      Delivering a pizza to a woman who was essentially a shut in. My delivery partner brought a cheese-less pizza to her apartment every day. He was confident that he was the only human interaction she could count on and he took that pretty seriously. Man did it pull on my heartstrings.

·      My delivery partner was Hispanic and he was driving a stick shift that kept stalling out. So much so that when we got back to the shop there was an irate man complaining to the manager about his driving and questioning the driver’s immigration status. While my empathy was strong, I did not have the guts to speak up for him and I still regret my lack of action.

The next morning, I sat at my company issued teal iMac and drafted a recap of my day in the field. I cannot imagine that the three points above found their way into the document. That would have been way too vulnerable. I did make two recommendations that were used in the pitch. The first came from my experience in facilitating a back of house delivery from Domino’s closed distribution system. Snapple (my core client) had done an effective job using the back of delivery trucks as a mobile billboard for new products and I felt that Domino’s could do the same to promote their LTOs. I also recommended that they consider contemporizing uniforms for the drivers.

As an AE working on a pitch of this magnitude, I had no shot at attending the pitch meeting, but I am proud to say that because of my wardrobe recommendations, my picture in the Domino’s polo next to our delivery car made it into the PowerPoint. The agency ended up winning the business and I harbor no delusions that it was because of my recommendations from the day in the field.

What I can say for certain is that the day left me feeling energized. It forced me to make real world connections that I never would have sitting in my cube in New York City. I fell in love with doing the roadwork and getting closer to the target. Somehow, I managed to take that day and point my career in that direction. While so much has changed, one thing remains – the heart and the head of the target audience. Over the years, my implications have gotten a little bit sharper, but I take nothing for granted and still approach target audience learning opportunities with a beginners mind.